Your bag is empty.
All movie franchises—11 years, 22 films—should be lucky enough to end as lovingly, sadly, entertainingly, reverently and ambitiously as Avengers: Endgame. Four things you should consider before seeing it. Bring tissues. Don’t read spoilers. Manage your fluid intake, for sure. See it on the biggest screen possible.
The labyrinthine movie, weighing in at a flabby, sprawling, sometimes-unfocused 182 minutes, begins five years after that climactic Infinity War snap that obliterated half of all things living and left the galaxy in ash and cinder. In the wake of the unimaginable destruction wrought by the purple philosophical despot Thanos (Josh Brolin, all gravitas and madness), the remaining Avengers—Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Black Widow, Thor—are mostly hollow, shell-shocked ruins, mourning the scorched, broken world and their failure to save it.
They ache, and so does the movie—which, for almost two hours, is pretty much about how five beloved characters played by five charismatic, beloved actors deal with crushing depression and grief. One drinks, another chooses selfless optimism, another rages, another is sullen and lost, yet another succumbs to mercenary anarchy, and so on. For more than one, being an Avenger was pretty much all they had going for them. (See HBO’s The Leftovers).
We may come to Avengers: Endgame primed for kick-ass violence and retribution against Thanos and his spawn. But, as directed by Anthony and Joseph Russo and scripted by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the movie is an intimate epic, better in its slowed-down vignettes of the heroes’ private lives than in its special effects-driven meant-to-be-showstoppers. It takes goofster Ant-Man (the essential Paul Rudd) to propose a Thanos-thwarting time travel/heist that brings The Band back together, despite plenty of wisecracks about how time-travel movies always get it wrong.
‘Avengers: Endgame’ is one hell of an effective entertainment-delivery system.
The best part of their do-or-die Final Mission means that we now and then get the chance to hang out with War Machine (Don Cheadle); Captain Marvel (Brie Larson, briefly); the ambiguously motivated daughter of Thanos, Nebula (Karen Gillan, superb); and wisenheimer raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), among many, many others. As expected, as the plot line sends the characters caroming from Manhattan and the mythical Asgard, Morag and Vormir, and those six all-powerful infinity stones cores get reclaimed, lost again, found, on and on.
Also as expected, scores get settled, vengeance rains down like fury, body parts get severed, long-running plot strands get woven back together. But it’s whenever Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Rudd and others ally to deliver whoop-ass along with their smart, snarky tongue-in-cheek stuff—the engine that sends MCU stuff soaring above the also-ran comic book films—that underscore how it won’t be easy to let go of characters with whom we’ve spent a decade growing older. Even when we don’t fully buy that this is really the last we will see of them.
As with most MCU flicks, this one is shamelessly self-referential and loaded with Easter eggs and callbacks that will be lost on any newbie, and a few of which might even sail past Marvel diehards. But make no mistake. Avengers: Endgame is one hell of an effective entertainment-delivery system, from its lavish Charles Wood production design and Trent Opaloch cinematography, to its canny music choices ranging from the 1940s greats Harry James and Helen Forrest to rock classics by Traffic and The Kinks and Steppenwolf. It’s a rousing, emotionally moving sendoff.